BACKGROUND Adherence of Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria to lung cells is a first step in the progression from asymptomatic carriage to pneumonia. Adherence abilities vary widely among S. pneumoniae patient isolates. In this study, the binding properties of S. pneumoniae isolates and the effects of binding on activation of the Nuclear Factor-Kappa-B (NFkappaB) pathway and cytokine secretion by...

background: the development and progression of human tumors is accompanied by various cellular biochemical and genetic alterations. these events include tumor cells interaction with extracellular matrix molecules including hyaluronan and hyaluronan binding protein (ha-habp). hyaluronan is a large polysaccharide associated with pericellular matrix of proliferating, migrating cells, regulation of...

multiple sclerosis (ms) is a complex, demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (cns) with variable phenotypic presentations, while guillain-barre syndrome (gbs) is the prototypic acute inflammatory disorder that affects the peripheral nervous system. myasthenia gravis (mg) is a t cell dependent and antibody mediated autoimmune disease. although it has been shown that complement plays...

Thermodynamic analyses and molecular dynamics calculations demonstrated that i-motifs in a hydrated ionic liquid of choline dihydrogen phosphate (choline dhp) were more stable than G-quadruplexes due to choline ion binding to loop regions in the i-motifs. Interestingly, the i-motifs formed even at physiological pH in the choline dhp-containing solution.

The basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) eukaryotic transcription factors have the ability to form multiple dimer combinations. This property, together with limited DNA-binding specificity for the E box (CANNTG), makes them ideally suited for combinatorial control of gene expression. We tested the ability of all nine Saccharomyces cerevisiae bHLH proteins to regulate the enolase-encoding gene ENO1. EN...

lactoferrin (lf) is an iron-binding multi-functional glycoprotein which has numerous physiological functions such as iron transportation, anti-microbial activity and immune response. in this study, different in silico approaches were exploited to investigate lf protein properties in a number of mammalian species. results showed that the iron-binding site, dna and rna-binding sites, signal pepti...

The neuronal calcium sensor proteins Visinin-like Proteins 1 (VILIP-1) and 3 (VILIP-3) are effectors of guanylyl cyclase and acetyl choline receptors, and transduce calcium signals in the brain. The "calcium-myristoyl" switch, which involves a post-translationally added myristoyl moiety and calcium binding, is thought to regulate their membrane binding capacity and therefore, play a critical ro...

Rat liver mitochondria possess a specific choline transporter in the inner membrane. The transporter shows saturable kinetics at high membrane potential with a Km of 220 microM and a Vmax of 0.4 nmol/mg of protein/min at pH 7.0 and 25 degrees C. At physiological concentrations of choline, the rate of choline uptake by the transporter shows a linear dependence on membrane potential; uptake is di...

Phosphatidylcholine (PC), a common phospholipid of the eukaryotic cell membrane, is present in the cell envelope of the intracellular pathogen Brucella abortus, the etiological agent of bovine brucellosis. In this pathogen, the biosynthesis of PC proceeds mainly through the phosphatidylcholine synthase pathway; hence, it relies on the presence of choline in the milieu. These observations imply ...